The generation of 3D content and in particular of 3D animated content is becoming increasingly popular. Despite this trend, creating 3D characters that can be animated is still typically left to artists with specialized training.
A 3D character is typically composed using one or more meshes, a skeleton and skinning weights. A mesh is typically a set of polygons defining the surface of an object, which often serves as the appearance of a 3D character. An object can be a character or any other discrete element in 3D visualization. A skeleton is typically a set of rigid items, or “bones”, generally under the mesh of an object, analogous to anatomical bones. These skeleton bones are typically bonded to the mesh in order to provide motion to the 3D character model. Rigging is the process of creating a suitable skeleton for a character, binding the skeleton to the character mesh using skinning weights and defining forward kinematic parameters or inverse kinematic parameters that determine how the character moves. The animation of a rigged 3D character involves applying motion data to the character's skeleton to drive the character's mesh. The generation of animations can be technically challenging and is often performed by artists with specialized training.
Patterns within computer generated 3D content can be found utilizing Principal Components Analysis (PCA). PCA is a process that utilizes an orthogonal transformation to convert a dataset of values into a set of values of linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components. A set of values expressed in terms of the principal components can be referred to as a feature vector. A feature vector can correspond to a particular aspect of 3D generated content such as a representation of a particular pattern or to the values of the pixels of an image.